Firefox continues to gain as Internet Explorer, Chrome slide

Windows 7 growth slows, and Safari remains the mobile favorite.

Firefox is still fighting back. After dipping below 20 percent share in May, it looked like the browser was sure to relinquish its silver medal position to Chrome. June saw a surprise turnaround, and that has continued into July.

Internet Explorer stays in gold with a 53.90 percent share of the desktop market, down 0.10 points from June. Firefox is up 0.14 points to 20.2 percent. Chrome picks up the bronze with an 18.9 percent share, down 0.18 points from a month ago. Safari is up 0.17 points to 4.90 percent, and Opera is essentially unchanged, down 0.01 points to 1.59 percent.

So Chrome just missed out on overtaking Firefox again. In another near miss, Windows XP is still, for another month at least, the most widely used operating system. The last few months have seen Windows 7 make steady ground on its ancient predecessor. In May and June, Windows XP made substantial losses, down 1.23 and 1.24 points, respectively, for a June share of 43.61 percent. In those same months, Windows 7 made large gains, picking up 1.84 and 1.08 points, for a June share of 43.61 percent.

But July seemed to show a slowing down of these changes, allowing the old operating system to retain its lead. Windows XP still fell, down 0.75 points to 42.86 percent, and Windows 7 still gained, up 0.62 points to 42.21 percent. Still, it looks certain now that Windows 7 will become the plurality operating system by the time Windows 8 is released.

Mobile Safari continues to be the browser of choice when it comes to tablets and smartphones, buoyed by the iPad's substantial sales. With the release of the third generation "new iPad," the iPad family became the most widely used mobile devices.

While Mozilla has chosen a development model for Firefox that's similar to the one used by Google for Chrome, getting users to upgrade and switch is still posing the group significant difficulties. Optimistically, 30 percent of Firefox users have out-of-date versions that are susceptible to known security flaws.

I hate safari. I have tried forcing myself to liking it several times because, well, it lives in my Mac after all but in the end always gravitate back to Firefox - it's just such a much more powerful and extensible browser.

The only thing I like about safari is the back/forth page animation. It's really great to be able to peek at your previously visited site before fully committing to a full wipe gesture. I get the feeling this must be a safari only API since to this day we do not have that with firefox (or chrome for that matter)

There is no way on Earth they can claim that logs from a biased sample of websites, corrected to only count unique visitors, and then weighted by the CIA's internet usage per country data, could possibly give you the precision to know that Firefox's marketshare climbed by 0.14 points this month, even leaving aside the question of if the numbers they show accurately represent the real world and not just their sample.

Would be interesting to see a current OS breakdown for the Ars Technica traffic... I realise that this article is about browsers and not OS, but if Ars has the data it shouldn't be too hard to stick up a graph.

I have always assumed that Windows users are more inclined to ditch IE in favour of another browser than Mac users are to ditch Safari, I'm sure there's a simple analysis that could be done to see if that's right or not.

There is no way on Earth they can claim that logs from a biased sample of websites, corrected to only count unique visitors, and then weighted by the CIA's internet usage per country data, could possibly give you the precision to know that Firefox's marketshare climbed by 0.14 points this month, even leaving aside the question of if the numbers they show accurately represent the real world and not just their sample.

The fact is that there is no better public source of information on this matter. The information may be noisy and have limitations in accuracy, but there isn't anything more precise out there.

(There are better non-public information sources, however - Google sees basically the entire web when it visits google.com, and has good capabilities to track individual users. But that data has not been shared publicly.)

The fact is that there is no better public source of information on this matter. The information may be noisy and have limitations in accuracy, but there isn't anything more precise out there.

(There are better non-public information sources, however - Google sees basically the entire web when it visits google.com, and has good capabilities to track individual users. But that data has not been shared publicly.)

The use of "points" when referring to percentage points is a bit confusing. Maybe you should just go by units of basis points? I usually assume thats what people are talking about when they say "points". In any case, "108 points" is a lot easier to parse than "1.08 points".

The fact is that there is no better public source of information on this matter. The information may be noisy and have limitations in accuracy, but there isn't anything more precise out there.

(There are better non-public information sources, however - Google sees basically the entire web when it visits google.com, and has good capabilities to track individual users. But that data has not been shared publicly.)

With that said, there is a huge disparity between the two measures. One has Chrome at #3 and one at #1. Some of the disparity is explained by one measure counting users and the other usage, but still, this is hard to explain unless at least one of the two is significantly in error, and we can't really be sure which that is.

There is no way on Earth they can claim that logs from a biased sample of websites, corrected to only count unique visitors, and then weighted by the CIA's internet usage per country data, could possibly give you the precision to know that Firefox's marketshare climbed by 0.14 points this month, even leaving aside the question of if the numbers they show accurately represent the real world and not just their sample.

The fact is that there is no better public source of information on this matter. The information may be noisy and have limitations in accuracy, but there isn't anything more precise out there.

(There are better non-public information sources, however - Google sees basically the entire web when it visits google.com, and has good capabilities to track individual users. But that data has not been shared publicly.)

I have no problem with the overall numbers, though it's always good for people to keep in mind the differing methodologies of the browser stat sites and why they end up with different numbers.

What bugs me is the site that I come to for good science reporting is repeating these numbers as if they are at a reasonable precision, and headlining with trends based solely on differentials likely entirely within the noise. There are trends here, but clearly a month's numbers aren't going to cut it.

They can't even add an option (that several people have been requesting since 2009) to disable or auto-hide the Chrome downloads bar that intrusively pops up after each and every download. No sympathy here if Chrome continues to slide.

There is no way on Earth they can claim that logs from a biased sample of websites, corrected to only count unique visitors, and then weighted by the CIA's internet usage per country data, could possibly give you the precision to know that Firefox's marketshare climbed by 0.14 points this month, even leaving aside the question of if the numbers they show accurately represent the real world and not just their sample.

The fact is that there is no better public source of information on this matter. The information may be noisy and have limitations in accuracy, but there isn't anything more precise out there.

(There are better non-public information sources, however - Google sees basically the entire web when it visits google.com, and has good capabilities to track individual users. But that data has not been shared publicly.)

I have no problem with the overall numbers, though it's always good for people to keep in mind the differing methodologies of the browser stat sites and why they end up with different numbers.

What bugs me is the site that I come to for good science reporting is repeating these numbers as if they are at a reasonable precision, and headlining with trends based solely on differentials likely entirely within the noise. There are trends here, but clearly a month's numbers aren't going to cut it.

Fair point, reporting the standard deviation here would be useful to understand significance. Just judging by previous months it definitely seems reasonable to assume the changes in any individual month fall in the margin of error.

Looking at the chart over time lets you filter out the noise though - the trends are clear (but very different than in other measures of market share..)

I recently had the happy news of no longer having to support IE7. This is so freaken' wonderful, it's beyond words.

IE6/7 are the banes of IE, any useful techniques to keep CSS clean don't work. IE8 is crummy as well, but not as bad. Not even close. Just wish MS would release Ie10 for windows XP and finally put the nail in the IE incompatibility coffin, and let Ie10 shine into a new era of IE where IE is actually good.

Firefox or nothing for me. I haven't used IE since Firefox was known as Phoenix way back. I've played with Chrome, but I couldn't get passed the interface and I loathe Safari. For one thing, I *must* have the Live Bookmarks feature. Thats where I get all my RSS feeds and depend on them. I would never visit a frontpage of a site and scroll up and down looking for stories to read. With Live Bookmarks can easily pick out what I want to read and what to skip. Just like I did for this article.

There is an extension for Chrome that kinda does it, but its very messy and inelegant, not to mention doesn't work half the time. And I've gotten way more crashes and weird behavior in Chrome than in FF ime. Not worth it. As for Safari I cant even close tabs with a middle mouse click which is something of a must for me when Im using the mouse. I just hate using Safari, hate the interface, hate bookmark management etc.

I dont use many extensions, just need adblock, status-4-eva and Lastpass. But I'm so used to the FF interface and how to customize and tweak it the way I want, I have zero interest in ever switching to anything else. Moz would have to screw up *real* bad for me to go elsewhere.